Zoom in on this particular hair, though, and you'll find something even stranger: a teeny, tiny comic strip called "Juanita Knits the Planet." Ten micron-tall Juanita and her friends were etched onto the hair using a focused ion beam. The microscopic comic strip was created for the Exceptional Hardware Software Meeting, a gathering for open source and DIY enthusiasts in Germany.

lekernel writes: Will Jack is a 17 year old high school student from the US who enjoys nothing more than building nuclear fusion reactors in his basement. He will be the keynote speaker later this month at Berlin's Exceptionally Hard and Soft Meeting, a conference on the frontiers of open source and DIY. Other topics covered by the conference are the CERN open hardware initiative, microchip reverse-engineering, DIY vacuum tubes, and more.

An anonymous reader writes: Are you sad that the 29C3 will take place in Hamburg but you want to visit Berlin ? As seen on dangerousprototypes.com,
"(...) the premiere of the uniquely named Exceptionally Hard and Soft Meeting (EHSM) (...) will be held in Berlin, Germany on December 28-30, 2012. “EHSM is turning out to be something like the OSH Summit this side of the pond. (...)”
"
The schedule looks like a pile of refined geek pr0n: Garage electronic parts manufacture, CPU design, nuclear physics...

lekernel writes: LED blinkers, microcontroller breakout boards and mediocre 3D printers no longer excite you? Then, the Exceptionally Hard and Soft Meeting may be something for you. The conference aims at featuring the most hardcore DIY, hacker and open source projects, such as electron microscopes, rocket science and software-defined radios and radars. It will be held at the end of December in Berlin, Germany.

lekernel writes: LED blinkers, microcontroller breakout boards and mediocre 3D printers no longer excite you? Then, the Exceptionally Hard and Soft Meeting may be something for you. The conference aims at featuring the most hardcore DIY and open source projects, such as electron microscopes, rocket science and software-defined radios and radars. It will be held at the end of December in Berlin, and they have an open call for participation.

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Steve Blank, a professor at Berkeley and Stanford and serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, says that the the Facebook IPO is the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley as we know it. "Silicon Valley historically would invest in science, and technology, and, you know, actual silicon," says Blank. "If you were a good venture capitalist you could make $100 million." But there's a new pattern emerging created by two big ideas that will lead to the demise of Silicon Valley as we know it. The first is putting computer devices, mobile and tablet especially, in the hands of billions of people and the second is that we are moving all the social needs that we used to do face-to-face onto the computer and this trend has just begun. "If you think Facebook is the end, ask MySpace. Art, entertainment, everything you can imagine in life is moving to computers. Companies like Facebook for the first time can get total markets approaching the entire population." That's great for Facebook but it means Silicon Valley is screwed as a place for investing in advanced science. "If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick?" concludes Blank. "The headline for me here is that Facebook's success has the unintended consequence of leading to the demise of Silicon Valley as a place where investors take big risks on advanced science and tech that helps the world. The golden age of Silicon valley is over and we're dancing on its grave.""

This is where the Milkymist project is different - you can implement the SoC on a small, affordable FPGA and still get good performance, in part thanks to dedicated accelerators.
By the way, there is also FPGA platforms for OpenSPARC so your estimate is too high, but they're still quite expensive and OpenSPARC runs pretty slowly on them.

The LM32 _is_ a good example of open source CPU; and there's more to open source than GNU. Also, it is simply more technically appropriate here than LEON, OpenRISC and OpenSPARC.
There was some confusion about the LM32 license (sparkled among other things by confidentiality notices left in the source files) but Lattice cleaned up most of the mess a few months ago.
The Lattice license says:
" The Provider grants to You a personal, non-exclusive right to use object
code created from the Software or a Derivative Work to physically implement
the design in devices such as a programmable logic devices or application
specific integrated circuits."
So - yes, we can implement it in non-Lattice FPGAs.
There is no MMU; some people talked about building one but it did not happen. We are open to switching to OpenRISC should it become as small and fast as LM32.

lekernel writes: The Milkymist project have started shipping their so-called "video synthesizer", a device used by concert and other event organizers to create live visual effects. Most interestingly, the device is based on their fully open source system-on-chip design, including both a CPU and graphics accelerators — the latter being a significant part of what Open Graphics is still struggling with.

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Even though lekernel loves most areas of hacking, a large number of his projects have been around the latest electronic devices out there.
He has joined the Prism54 developers' team in 2004, authoring drivers and firmware for different, newer chipsets for which no specification was available. He has also been involved in different industrial projects such as the development in 2006 of the 802.11 embedded driver stack for the Wi-Fi smart rabbit called Nabaztag. In 2008, he has co-founded the OpenPattern company, which produces FPGA-based open hardware devices, and he is mostly involved in PCB and FPGA developments. He is also an active member of the/tmp/lab geek collective, and one of the inventors of the "Consumer-B-Gone" ringtone.
He is now spending a lot of time on the development of the Milkymist videosynth platform.